sympathy
Pluralsympathies (some meanings)
Often confused with empathy
- 1Sorrow or pity felt for someone else who is suffering or in distress.
He spoke with genuine sympathy to the grieving widow at the service.
Her sympathy for the stranded travelers prompted her to offer them shelter.
Similarcompassion, pity, empathy, commiseration, mercy
Oppositeindifference, callousness, coldness
Note
The everyday sense, and the closest to the word's Greek source, sumpatheia, "fellow feeling", which reached English through Late Latin and Middle French. The object usually follows for: sympathy for migrants, sympathy for a widow. Pity and compassion are near synonyms. What sympathy keeps from the Greek is the "fellow" in fellow feeling, the sense of feeling with someone rather than only for them.
- 2A formal expression of pity or sorrow for another person's misfortune.
The president extended his sympathy to the victims' families in a public statement.
Colleagues sent messages of sympathy after the accident at the plant.
Similarcompassion, pity, commiseration, condolence
Note
The plural turns a private feeling into a formula. Sympathies are what one offers, extends or sends after a death or a misfortune. The singular survives in set phrases such as a message of sympathy. Set beside the felt emotion, this is sympathy as an act of courtesy, and its tone is formal rather than intimate.
- 3The ability to share in the feelings of another person.
His deep sympathy allowed him to sense exactly what his patients feared.
Without sympathy, a counselor cannot truly grasp a client's pain.
Similarempathy, compassion, understanding
- 4Support for, agreement with, or approval of someone's ideas or goals, or loyalty to them.
Her political sympathies lay firmly with the reformers.
The journalist made no secret of his sympathy for the independence cause.
Similarsupport, loyalty, favor, approval
Oppositeopposition, antipathy, hostility
Note
Where someone's loyalties lean, and usually plural when the leaning is political: to be suspected of Communist sympathies was enough to land people on the Hollywood blacklist. In such phrases the word can carry an undertone of suspicion rather than warmth. Political sympathies lie with a party or cause, and the plural is the natural form for describing someone's allegiances.
- 5Support given in the form of shared feelings or opinions.
Several unions walked out in sympathy with the dismissed workers.
Readers expressed their sympathy for the campaign by signing the petition.
Similarsupport, solidarity
Oppositeopposition
- 6A connection between people based on similar thoughts or feelings, or a tendency to share them.
A natural sympathy of taste drew the two composers together.
They argued for hours, yet a basic sympathy of values kept them in accord.
Similaraffinity, harmony, accord, rapport
Note
Here nobody suffers on someone else's behalf; the feeling is held in common. Shakespeare's The Most Lamentable Romaine Tragedie has "a sympathy of woe": two griefs answering each other, rather than one person consoling another. The construction sympathy of + noun (of taste, of values, of woe) marks this sense, while sympathy for usually points to pity for another's suffering.
- 7A connection through which a change affecting one person or thing produces a matching change in another.
The bridge began to sway in sympathy with the marching soldiers' steps.
Stock markets across the region rose in sympathy with the recovery abroad.
Note
The old, almost physical sense, and one the Greek adjective already carried: "exerting mutual influence, interacting". William Whewell in 1858 writes of the sympathy of volcanic and earthquake action in distant regions. Renaissance thought used it to tie the fate of men to the planets, and railway engineers in 1960 sought sympathy between a coach body and its track. The phrase in sympathy with keeps this sense in everyday use.
- 8A mutual or parallel susceptibility, or a condition produced by it.
Pluck the lower string and its octave will vibrate in sympathy.
The patient's healthy eye watered in sympathy with the injured one.
Similarresonance
- 9In art, a harmonious relationship among elements, such as the shapes or colors in a painting.
The artist created a subtle sympathy between the curve of the hills and the arc of the sky.
Reviewers admired the sympathy of tone that unified the portrait.
Oppositediscord, disharmony
Note
Painters and critics use the word for parts of a work that answer one another, so that line, shape and color read as unified rather than discordant. It is the idea of mutual correspondence carried into composition. It typically takes of or between: a sympathy of hue across a canvas, a sympathy between two figures.
Practice
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Origin
Borrowed from Middle French sympathie, from Late Latin sympathīa ("feeling in common"), from Ancient Greek sumpatheia ("fellow feeling"). It breaks down into sym- ("together") plus -pathy ("feeling"), and it displaced the native Old English efnþrōwung, literally "co-suffering."